Page 44 - Nuts to You - The Nutcracker Retold

shout and rushed down the stairs with his spear in front of him.
Just then, the Mouse Queen stepped through the doors, smacking her lips after eating her first sugar plum and ready for more. She was not happy to see mice stampeding down the stairs, and she was even more unhappy when they crashed into her. Mice were a dozen deep between Franz and the Mouse Queen, but she plowed through them, then calmly snapped off the tip of Franz’s spear and ate it! Franz stood speechless – he had totally forgotten that everything in the Land of Sweets was made of sugar!
With a roar, the Mouse Queen kicked loose of all the meeslings around her. Franz was so shocked, he grabbed the nearest candied sword and swung it at the Mouse Queen. It broke into a hundred pieces and for a mad moment, the Mouse Queen was stopped, as her own mice scrambled for the bits of candy around her feet. In desperation, Franz pulled a mace off the wall. As the Mouse Queen finally pushed her way through the forest of tails from downward dipping mice, Franz yelled, “En garde!” and swung the mace like a baseball bat and hit the Mouse Queen full force.
Unfortunately for Franz, the mace was made of the same stuff of gumdrops. It bounced off the Mouse Queen so hard that it first jerked Franz’s hands back, and then the rest of him, so that he flew across the room and landed on a marshmallow sofa, which fortunately for him, broke his fall and gave him a soft place to land.
Before Franz could leap up, the Mouse Queen and her meeslings rushed up the stairs and into the throne room.
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